February 15, 2013

123D Creature From Autodesk Makes Monsters Real:
Check this out. The team at Autodesk, creators of the suite of 123D programs, just added a new tool to the arsenal: 123D Creature. And they’ve made a Thingiverse account!
We all know the higher-end 3D modeling programs from Autodesk like Maya and AutoCAD. They’re targeted to people with a bunch of experience or professional need for 3D design. The 123D programs like 123D Catch and 123D Sculpt let users with far less experience create really sweet 3D models. They’ve taken this mission one step further with 123D Creature.
Watch this! Even if you’re at work. You’re boss will love it.

Yes! You saw that correctly. 123D Creature is an iPad app (available on the App Store for a sweet introductory price) that basically lets you sculpt any kind of creature you can think of.
Oh snap, is that is a MakerBot Replicator 2 featured in the video? Yep! Just export the 3D design file from the app, run it through MakerWare, and bam! You’ve got yourself a custom figure ready to for printing on your MakerBot. This has to be one of the easiest ways ever to do this kind of organic modeling. It’s like hand-sculpting clay figures, but the clay is trapped inside an iPad screen. (Yes, I actually get paid to make analogies like that.)
We’re gawking at all the examples that have already gone up. Dan from the 123D Creature team writes on Thingiverse that all of these models are available in their in-app Creature community, so you can open them up and modify them.
Please for the love of your childhood dreams, and especially your nightmares, go and create some awesome new Creatures and upload them to Thingiverse. Let’s just say that there’s a pretty decent chance you’ll get featured if you do! Because we love this thing. Really, we do.